Letter from Saigon

Good Evening, Vietnam!

After a string of restaurant successes (Odeon, Indochine, 44, etc.) and at least two midlife crises, the author confronted his worst fear—terminal boredom. Trading the Manhattan–Hamptons–St. Barth’s grind for a neon-lit apartment in Saigon, he is diligently hitting the skids.

Brian McNally in familiar venues of his new habitat, Saigon. Photographs by John Stanmeyer.

I could not possibly have anticipated, 30 years ago, the moment last summer when I found myself, in my late 50s, stranded in Charles de Gaulle International Airport with six euros in my pocket, unmarried, no girlfriend, abandoned (temporarily) by my children, my cell phone critically low on battery, and my ex-wife screaming obscenities in my ear in really appalling English. Things could have been worse, and in fact they were. I was about to miss my return flight to Saigon, because I had left my passport and wallet at the hotel and my louche and decadent ex-family couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their leisurely midday breakfast to bring it out to me. Add to this gout, male-pattern baldness, and all the other horrors of late middle age circling like vultures in the background and it might be appreciated that this wasn’t my finest hour.

It escapes me exactly how, but I concede there is a possibility that I may have been partially to blame for this state of affairs. My life is marked by a procession of poor choices, but my choice of ex-wife and children has been brilliant. In the end, most ex-wives, while they don’t want you to die, don’t particularly want you to live either. But mine has, for the most part, shown more forbearance and grace than I deserve. On this occasion, though, both of these virtues had deserted her.

And so you might understand what it felt like, after possibly the most depressing 48 hours of my life, having left Paris a deadbeat loser, to finally get back to Saigon and head for Le Duyen barbershop, where I was welcomed as a returning hero by swarms of staggeringly pretty miniskirted girls. Hours of cosseting and fussing followed in the No. 1 V.I.P. room, while the wide-screen TV beamed a soccer game live from England. I vowed then that I would never leave this place, but that if I did I would take the girls of Le Duyen with me.

My trip to Paris was the first outside of Southeast Asia since I had moved to Saigon. I wish I could say my move here was an impulsive act of midlife liberation or a quixotic rejection of the material world (if it were the latter, there are those less charitable who would suggest that the material world rejected me first). But it was neither of these things. I moved here because I was bored to death with New York, because of the sobering realization that even if I live to 80 I still don’t have that long to live, and also to some extent because of a general sense of personal failure. Saigon itself was a more or less random decision. It could have been anywhere.

On the other hand, this was no mere midlife crisis. I had already been through a couple of those, and I know the difference. I am not given much to personal reflection or any desire to be overly familiar with my inner self, partly because the exterior world seems a lot more interesting and partly out of the terrifying prospect that the examined life might not be worth living, either.

It did, however, seem time to take stock and consider the future and what it might have in store. And what it had in store was hair receding on our heads and legs but sprouting everywhere in ears and nose; aching (in the words of the second-greatest living Canadian) in the places where we used to play; the cruel irony of Viagra’s offering hope precisely at the point in life when girls offer none; shuttling around in the triangle of hell that is Manhattan, the Hamptons, and St. Barth’s; waiting for a table at Bar Pitti surrounded by the usual caravan of fops, frauds, and toadies; and sitting in the Mercer lobby watching … well, just watching. It goes on and on, and none of it is good. This might be a crisis of the overprivileged but is no less a crisis for that.

And the smug, self-regarding, solipsistic generation I was born into is particularly ill-equipped to grow old. We were not so much born to be wild as born to be young. Obsessed with youth, we were not prepared for the hyenas of middle age snapping at our heels, not prepared for the inevitable physical decay, and certainly not prepared for not getting it. After dominating both for so long, we are now in a place where we don’t understand the culture and don’t speak the language.

At 16—an age when confusion and doubt are supposed to be part of the rite of passage—it was perfectly clear what you were supposed to do: walk around London in a mohair suit, tab collar, and Hush Puppies, head-butting people while fantasizing about Christine Keeler and listening to the Small Faces. It was simple. Now we spend hours agonizing over whether a certain kind of sneaker is age-appropriate, and frantically trying to stake out the elusive ground between curmudgeon on the one hand and tragically hip oldie on the other.

And I guess in the end that’s a large part of the reason I’m here. If you can’t read the signposts, they may as well be in Vietnamese. At least you have an excuse for not finding your way.

My first apartment in Saigon was one room on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up in a decrepit building on a working-class street. Next door to me, in a room only slightly smaller than mine, were what seemed like several hundred sullen and impoverished students living a Dostoyevskian nightmare. They must have slept stacked up like so many bags of cement on a warehouse pallet. No pawnbroker safe for miles. There were two toilets off the hallway, one for all of them and one for me. I was inclined to feel bad about this, but then I thought, Who cares?, and made sure my own toilet door was locked at all times.

A typical day at the neighborhood barbershop.

Opposite, the neon lights of the Rona, a 24-hour massage-and-karaoke emporium, flickered through threadbare curtains in a limp parody of a bad noir movie. This sustained me for a while, but without the cameras and voice-over from Joseph Cotten it eventually became depressing. And, outside, the April heat of Saigon was unrelenting, oppressive, and dizzying. It was a weird month or two. Often felt like going to the beach and shooting an Arab.

Not an auspicious beginning, but Saigon is an accessible city in the way that New York is and London is not. A hustle here and a hustle there and pretty soon—and with the help of some extravagant tipping—I had ingratiated myself with enough clip joints, barbershops, and cafés to cobble together some sort of social life. And by that time the sweltering heat had given way to the relative cool of the rainy season, and despite the occasional inconvenience of getting caught in some fetid tiers monde market—humming with avian flu and thronged with expectorating peasants (at least it seems like that when you’re waiting for the torrential rains to let up)—the rhythm of the rainy season has its own strange, hypnotic appeal.

While the barbershops may be sexy, they are in fact almost primly innocent. However, this is not the case with every service establishment in Saigon, and when I’m not working, which at the moment seems to be most of the time, a substantial part of my day is devoted to helping those poor creatures toiling in the grayer areas of the hospitality industry. They may look carefree enough, dancing on nightclub tables and drinking expensive champagne until dawn, but it is not widely known that they are routinely denied basic rights such as a guaranteed 40-hour workweek. And their health benefits are often quite inadequate. There are, as always, those godless cynics, skeptical of any human impulse to do good, who would question my motives, but if they don’t appreciate my efforts, the girls certainly do and demonstrate their gratitude in the most touching ways.

A downside to living in New York is that after a two-hour flight from La Guardia you find yourself in Canton, Ohio, or Raleigh, North Carolina. One of the attractions of living in Southeast Asia is that the same flight from Saigon will take you to Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Bali, Malaysia, and dozens of other exotic locations. And so, when not engaged in noble Gladstonian efforts to help those less fortunate than myself, I take as many side trips as I can.

Recently I spent a few days in Phnom Penh, where it seems tourists outnumber the locals by about eight to one. Everybody cast to type, the tourists mostly loud and fat, the locals sweet and humble—the loud and fat ones, though, rather less inclined to torture and murder one another. On the one hand, on the other hand. I was forced by my companion on the trip—the Librarian, as she is known (for reasons too obvious, and too thrilling, to go into now)—to revisit the former interrogation camp S-21 and the Killing Fields, and this grim expedition once again colored my image of the serene and smiling Khmer while reinforcing the Librarian’s conviction that the Vietnamese are the master race. Not an attractive point of view, but if you could see her when she gets all stern and nationalistic, you too might forgive her a few ideological quirks.

The French used to say that the Vietnamese grow the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Laotians listen to it grow. This is, as generalizations go, an obviously broad but nevertheless reasonable description of the character of the three countries, and generally the Cambodians, when not engaged in brutal internecine slaughter or the sex trafficking of children, are a laid-back, cheery, and hospitable bunch, and Phnom Penh is a relatively pleasant city, its center all sidewalk cafés, wide tree-lined boulevards, and French-colonial architecture.

Unfortunately, this gives way all too soon to dusty suburbs of corrugated-tin slums and appalling poverty. But in the same way you wouldn’t visit Scarsdale on a trip to Manhattan, you can pretty much skip all that stuff.

Some tourists I met complained that an annoying amount of one’s time in Phnom Penh is spent kicking small homeless orphans and horribly disfigured beggars back into the gutter while at the same time beating overly insistent tuk-tuk drivers with one’s riding crop. They claim that it may appear cruel, but it’s for the driver’s own good. This seems a little harsh to me, but I can see that if foreigners stop coming because they can’t enjoy a hard-earned martini in a promenade café without having to be harassed by starving street urchins and the twisted and gnarled bodies of Agent Orange victims, then the tourist industry will simply dry up—with devastating consequences for some rather remarkable and resourceful young people with whom it was my privilege to become acquainted. Go back and forth on this one.

A couple of months before I was in Cambodia they finally arrested Pol Pot’s right-hand man and also dragged Duch, the commandant of S-21, into court. Some people in Cambodia and elsewhere were suggesting that after all this time there was no point in bringing these aging apparatchiks to justice and that perhaps some sort of South African–style “reconciliation” process was preferable. I personally think the bastards—and until their dying day—should be waterboarded while having their genitals wired permanently to the electrical grid and their fingernails pulled out with pliers. And I would wish them a long life.

There you are, a visit to S-21 has the paradoxical effect of turning the mild tourist into a violent avenger, dreaming up lurid and exotic tortures for feeble octogenarians. Even while I was at the camp, I was so infuriated by two Frenchwomen who spent most of their time—in this ineffably sad memorial to murdered women and children—giggling about something or other that I felt like taking one of the bamboo poles that were used to beat prisoners to death and crushing their skulls with it. But thought in the end that even in the age of irony that would have been a little rich.

“A substantial part of my day is devoted to helping those poor creatures toiling in the grayer areas of the hospitality industry.”

Flew back via the Vietnamese hill town of Dalat on some dodgy Tupolev, which against all odds failed to do what Russian planes do best—which is crash—and then on to Saigon. Immediately back to my apartment to stay up until five a.m. watching England succeeding against all odds in doing what they do best, which is lose football matches. The English soccer team and the circus that surrounds it are especially depressing because they embody the absolute awfulness of certain aspects of the English and of English life. But then, as is my habit on these all too frequent occasions, I turned to the obituary pages of The Guardian for consolation. And was not disappointed, because halfway through a sober and respectful (and fortuitously appropriate) eulogy to a famous and widely respected footballer, who later went on to an illustrious career as a national coach, was this paragraph:

In March 1987 his wife, Isa, left him for a wealthy meat trader. In July 1988 he married Elaine Allister—an event marred by a brawl involving his brother Billy and his father, Jack, both of whom were ejected from the reception.

The obit then continued in the same dignified tone as before. England redeemed! Not just left him. Not merely wealthy. But a wealthy meat trader! And not just the gratuitous inclusion of the brawl—conjuring up as it does the typical working-class English wedding—but the inclusion of the names Billy and Jack, and the recording of their ejection.

If that paragraph of the obituary was carelessly intended humor, the Vietnamese DVD I bought on the street was not. It was a boxed set of six De Niro movies with three other random films thrown in. Excellent quality, and cost me $4. If the price didn’t tip me off to the possibility that this might be a knockoff, the cover blurb pretty much confirmed it. After the headline gangster robert de niro came “Black helped eldest brother to come, the fire exploded a condition imminent!”

Along similar lines I have kept all my text messages from the lovely My (pronounced Me), a nightclub hostess—and we use the term loosely—who could well have written the above blurb. She works at a popular Saigon café, where an aging Vietnamese Beatnik sings the same half-dozen 50s French pop songs over and over again. She learned her English from Japanese and Korean customers, and not one of the text messages makes the slightest bit of sense. But they are poetry in their own way, and I cherish them.

We are drawing to the end of the holiday season in Vietnam, an extended secular celebration of any religious, pagan, or political event that comes to hand from late November to mid-February, when it all culminates in the biggest bacchanal of them all, Tet, the lunar new year.

Christmas in Saigon is an extraordinary affair. Little time for the sort of peaceful contemplation that I, for one, normally find so rewarding. The Vietnamese celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus by happily ignoring the religious aspect completely, instead concentrating on the potential for commercial advantage and 24-hour partying. Fewer than 7 percent of the population are Christian—and many of them only nominally—while more than 80 percent are “without religion,” though it seems that 100 percent of this godless people celebrate the birthday of Our Savior by dancing the night away on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in a fantastic (and, to some, wonderfully encouraging) display of atheistic appropriation. Religion and ideology no match for making money and having fun.

Nevertheless, it was comforting to bathe in the glow of fairy lights and the general atmosphere of seasonal goodwill, having just returned from a (literally) misguided and harrowing trip to the remoter and stunningly beautiful regions of Ha Giang Province, in the northwest of Vietnam. We traveled on vertiginous, crumbling mountain roads with 1,000-foot sheer drops and no guardrails, in an ancient Land Cruiser piloted by a 14-year-old (I’m guessing here) driver-guide who spoke no English and possessed little sense of direction. Nor, apparently, much grasp of the concept of mortality. And all of this spent driving through thick fog and clouds. Terrifying, absolutely rigid with fear most of the time. We didn’t see another foreigner or tourist for three days, which should have tipped us off to something.

Despite all this I would have continued—after all, what’s a few extra years of drooling senility tacked onto a useless life—but I was with my children, and, thinking that they still probably had something to live for, I decided to turn back. A pity, really, because this is an amazing part of the world, inhabited by several ethnic Montagnard tribes who are shy, charming, and friendly in equal parts.

Wonderful to have the children here, of course, but after three weeks I wasn’t entirely unhappy when I was able to resume with the general unraveling of my life, an enterprise that had been gathering such splendid momentum before their visit, although the life, it must be said, wasn’t bound too tightly in the first place.